PAIDEIA

PAIDEIA. Paideia is derived from the Greek for child, pais, and in the Hellenistic era evolved into the general term for upbringing, though with the particular sense of formation or education; or it may be simply translated as “culture.” By the 1st c. the word signified intimate acquaintance with the classics of Greek thought and literature: poets, playwrights, orators, historians, and philosophers. Just as the “classical education” of Renaissance humanism or 19th c. Eton were both based on this product of pre-Christian Hellenism (q.v.), paideia was the passport to the higher reaches of Greco-Roman society and the badge of cultivation. Everyone who wanted to be anyone, whether Jew or Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, or “Barbarian,” strove to obtain it.

Christian writers, too, take up the term and its contents, particularly Justin Martyr and the great Alexandrians, Clement and Origen (qq.v.). These men adopted the term, embraced the philosophers, and sought at the same time to cast the biblical word of God (q.v.), the Christ of the Gospels, in the role of the supreme “Pedagogue,” the author and meaning of the classical paideia. This move opened up the higher reaches of Roman imperial society to the Church and, at the same time, inaugurated the ongoing struggle of Christian theology (q.v.) with the methods and presuppositions of the philosophers. Basil the Great (q.v.) therefore fought for the Christians’ right to paideia against the attempts of Emperor Julian (360–363) to close the schools to the Church.

At the same time, however, monasticism (q.v.) presented itself as the true paideia and monks as the real “philosophers.” This divorce or tension between love of classical antiquity and the ascetics’ suspicion of philosophy’s pretensions, continued throughout the Byzantine era (q.v.). It is expressed in the frequent contrast, beloved of the monks, between the “outer” and “inner” wisdom, i.e., the book knowledge gained through reason and the revelation of Christ in the heart of a believer schooled in humility (q.v.).